


September 17th, 2348

by Philosophizes



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Heartache, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-18
Updated: 2015-02-18
Packaged: 2018-03-13 16:41:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3388859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosophizes/pseuds/Philosophizes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A day in the new lives of Feliciano Vargas and Ludwig Beilschmidt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	September 17th, 2348

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a long time ago, when I still working out what direction _With Sorrow We Accept Our Fortunes_ was going to go. This is fine as a stand-alone fic, but for people who've read/are reading the _Bad Decisions ___series...
> 
> __This is what could have been.__

Three hundred years, eleven months, and nineteen days.

Feliciano checks the date every morning.

Today is September 17th, 2348.

He sits up in bed and stares out the window. It shows him a view of the Grand Canal in Venice. Yesterday, the false window was showing St. Mark’s Basilica, and the day before, the Lagoon from the southernmost edge of his old city.

Venice is long gone, sunk under the sea, finally able to wed the one she’d been so long betrothed too. The only ones to disturb her now are seagoing archaeologists and rich tourists.

Feliciano wishes they would stop.

He gets up and goes into the bathroom. He shaves with a few quick strokes, having long since given up the uneasy feeling having a laser so close to his skin used to bring. The shower is a quick mist, not as satisfying as the past water sprays or long baths, but better at sanitizing and more ecologically conscious.

The suit is old, the breakfast bland, and the coffee lukewarm.

The news is no news at all.

 _High temperature for today 18_ _⁰ C._ Les Tricolores _lost to_ Zhovto-Blakytni _yesterday. The Brazilian Stock Exchange is up; tensions in South Asia down._

Feliciano’s office is a ways north of his home, and he leaves five minutes before his usual arrival time.

Liechtenstein is there when he arrives, all smiles and good will. They talk of trade and border regulations and her royal’s recent decisions that go counter to what the Prime Minister in Rome told them to do.

He sends her off with a handshake, a kiss, and a warning.

There is paperwork.

Then lunch.

Hungary stops in. He tries to be polite and so does she.

Lovino calls from Rome. Feliciano tells him that everything is going fine up north, that Liechtenstein left with a promise to fix her policy problems, and that he and Hungary still can’t look each other in the eye.

His brother tells him that the EU wants to speak with them on Monday. Turkey and Poland will be there, he says; and Ukraine. Britain had to bow out, she said something about something else; France didn’t feel like putting in the effort.

They exchange their goodbyes and hang up.

Feliciano works until dinner, then leaves the office.

The bartender looks at him strangely when he asks for good German beer; but he’s gotten used to the way this tired-eyed man shows up every Friday evening, old despair hanging over his shoulders in something like resignation and something like grief, and serves him.

He’s mostly stopped wondering at the phrasing. German is kitsch, all the world knows it- but everyone, he supposes, is entitled to their own tastes.

Feliciano downs the stein slowly, reminiscing about the days of hops and barley.

He’s home by ten and in bed by midnight. The house wishes him _‘buonanotte’_ because the stupid thing forgot how to say _‘gute Nacht’_ again, and Feliciano can’t remember how to change it back or turn the voice off.

* * *

Eleven days.

Ludwig drops a number from the count every sunrise.

Today is September 17th, 2348.

Morning for him means staring out over a skyline so changed that, if he hadn’t been here to see every building rise from the ground, he never would have been able to recognize it as Berlin.

He listens to the rattle in the kitchen behind him, and watches the traffic go by. It’s just as neat and orderly as it has always been, even though the vehicles look very different from the ones he’d driven once, and the technique is entirely different.

Ludwig almost wishes he could learn how.

He moves into the empty kitchen, shakes his head sadly at the dishes left out, and leaves the house.

The elevated monorail takes seven minutes to get to the office. It is crowded, and the turns make everyone but him sway to one side in unison. A few people stumble through his space, and he can’t muster up the annoyance needed to care about that sort of thing anymore.

He gets off at the stop everyone calls ‘The Old Reichstag’, even though the maps call it something different.

The basic structure of the office hasn’t changed at all in three hundred years. The desk is in the same spot, and the shelves, and the cabinets. An old relic, an analogue cuckoo clock, sits on a corner table, and gets wound every day.

The only thing that’s changed is that the computers have been upgraded countless times- but not integrated into the desk, no, never, it had too many memories, the console would just have to sit on top- and the window now has panes with an automatic tinting feature.

The décor hasn’t even changed. It’s been replaced with new fabrics and paints and carpets, of course, but pains were always taken to match everything exactly.

Ludwig has heard the other people in the building, especially the young ones, refer to it as ‘The Cave’.

As if a Nation would get rid of history like that. The office looks nearly the same as it did two owners ago, when Prussia first occupied it.

Ludwig hadn’t changed it at all, and has enough nostalgic longing left to appreciate the fact that it’s still much the same as it had been in 1894.

There is a visitor before lunch and one after; then a phone call in the afternoon.

Standard stuff. He’s used to it.

He doesn’t eat dinner, but that’s nothing new, and hasn’t been for a while, and never will be. He spends the time rehashing the same, tired old arguments and complaints about the decline and disrespect of his culture to the bar wall.

No one hears him, and he isn’t surprised.

The lights are back on at the house by ten, paint all over the floor by eleven, and everything dark and quiet by midnight.

Ludwig finishes sighing over the colorful mess in the studio that trails into the bathroom just in time to hear the house speaking the wrong preset.

He walks into the still bedroom and sits down on the edge of the bed.

“ _Gute Nacht_ ,” he says quietly. He tries to reach out and touch, but it doesn’t work tonight, either.

Ludwig spends his one hundred and nine thousand, nine hundred and twenty seventh sleepless night watching Feliciano dream, noting every nervous, unconscious twitch, feeling his heart break a little more at every anguished murmur of _‘Please, please… no; no I’m sorry come back- I love you’_ ; wishing that maybe today, on the tenth day before the three hundred and first anniversary of his death, Feliciano will realize he hasn’t gone anywhere.

* * *

It is September 18th, 2348.


End file.
